You’ve missed my main point. None of these ideas worked under Haig’s command. Nor was Haig able to make his own ideas work.
Your conclusion appears to be that this shows nothing could have worked. I draw a different conclusion - I think the problem was Haig was a bad general.
Tanks, poison gas, and amphibious attacks were tried by the British during the war. But Haig gave these plans only half-hearted support at best - he didn’t expect them to work, gave them the least support he could, and failed to follow up when they achieved local successes. A more visionary general might have committed to one of these ideas and made it work.
And heck, stosstruppen tactics did work. The Russians and the Germans both used them successfully. No reason why the British couldn’t have done the same. And while the Russians stumbled on these ideas almost accidentally, the Germans adopted these ideas deliberately. They saw how well they had worked for the Russians and consciously emulated what they had seen worked. If the Germans could do this, why couldn’t the British have done the same?
Nivelle didn’t come up with any new plan. He was just re-using the old plan with himself in charge of it. That’s hardly an innovation.
But at least France was holding their generals responsible. When Joffre failed, they replaced him with Nivelle. When Nivelle failed, they replaced him with Petain. Petain’s defensive strategy may not have done much better than Nivelle’s offensive strategy - but at least Petain wasn’t making the same mistakes as his predecessors. And when Petain failed, they replaced him with Foch.
Same thing with the Germans. Their army on the west was led by Moltke, then Falkenhayn, and then Hindenburg and Ludendorff - and each of these generals tried to do something different.
But for some reason, the British felt that Haig shouldn’t be held responsible for the things that happened under his command. They just let him stay in command, year after year, never learning from his mistakes.
As opposed to Passchendaele and the Somme? Those main events cost a lot more lives than the sideshows did and achieved less results. Maybe the British should have been trying more sideshows and fewer main events.
I get the feeling I’m out of my depth a little bit here; I haven’t studied WWI for a long time and even then it wasn’t to a high level. I seem to have forgotten a lot. But I’m going to keep talking.
I think this is a bit of an oversimplification. There were no massive breakthroughs, but there were a lot of countries involved and none of them really achieved huge successes beyond the original German offensive. The war wouldn’t have lasted 4 years if it did. With technology better suited to defensive warfare it’s no surprise. So battles like the Somme may have seemed a disaster (and there was, of course, huge loss of life) but there were lots lots of less tangible gains up for grabs. The Somme relieved pressure on the French at Verdun and helped make the Allies’ superior numbers an advantage by taking a lot of more experienced and better trained German soldiers out of the war. These could only be replaced with the kind of volunteers the British were fielding. We can only speculate as to what would have happened if the Somme or Passchendaele had just never happened, but I suspect without them the balance might have gone the other way.
Is there any credibility to the idea that without the Somme the Germans might have broken through at Verdun, starting a gradual Allied retreat that would have convinced the Americans to not bother getting involved and eventually led to an Allied surrender? And if that happened, would the Germans have been willing to accept more of a token victory than they were originally after? Considering they didn’t plan for such a long and arduous war maybe they would have been happy to just get out with a “win” even with few real gains.
I think the main reasoning against the “sideshows” (if you will) was that it was thought that if you beat Turkey (as an example) you would be knocking the props from under Germany.
The reality was different. Germany was propping them up, not the other way around.
Passchendaele and the Somme did cost more lives but they actually went towards defeating the Germans. Gallipoli and Mesopitamia (and Salonica) did nothing towards defeating the German army and until the German army was beaten the war would not be won. Attacks in these areas were no strategic threat to Germany - nor really to Austria-Hungary - so even a complete defeat in one of these areas was of little concern to the Central Powers. Finally although casualties were less they were just as high in relation to the forces involved. This is not surprising given that wherever the fight was it involved attacking the same mix of artillery, barbed wire, and machine guns as on the Western Front.
[On review - what Cicero said!]
This is what I do not understand. Where do you get the idea that Haig gave - say - tanks only half-hearted support? I have already pointed out that Haig was pressing for a thousand tanks within days of their first (not entirely successful) use. Never at any time in the remaining two years of the war did he have anything like that number available and those he did have were slow, under-armoured, horrendous to operate, and broke down with monotomous regularity. This would have been the same whoever was C-in-C of the BEF. Similarly poison gas was used as soon as it was available. It was a very useful component of the all arms battle system that won the war in 1918 (used mostly to suppress defending artillery positions) but it was not a panacea.
The BEF did use infiltration tactics - what you call Stossgrupen tactics - from late '17 onwards. Suppressing and bypassing strongpoint were standard tactics - the linear waves of infantry advancing steadily across no-man’s land into unsuppressed fire were from 1916.
You say a “more visionary general might have committed to one of these ideas and made it work”. Haig, the whole BEF, did make these ideas - and the true war winning use of massive and sudden artillery bombardment as part of an all arms battle system - work. The German army was defeated over and over again in the series of battle known as the 100 days. It was not Haig but Ludendorff that called for an armistice.
But my point is that changing commanders did nothing for either the French or the Germans. The new Generals were driven by the same considerations as their predecessors and the way they fought the war - and the casualties suffered - were driven by these considerations - location, technology, and numbers.
Look, I am not saying Haig was perfect. He had lots of faults but to see him as the problem and to assume someone else could have been much more successful is a mistake. More successful must either mean winning the war earlier than November 1918 or doing so with less casualties. It is my view that getting rid of Haig would have done neither. There was no alternative commander with a magic bullet.
Actually, the strategic point of the Gallipoli was to open up the Black Sea supply lines to Russia. So if the allies had succeeded at Gallipoli they might have kept Russia in the war.
You’re just speculating (as admittedly, am I). We can’t say as an objective fact that Passchendaele and the Somme helped win the war and Gallipoli and Mesopotamia did not. Nor can we say as an objective fact that a bigger campaign in the Balkans along with a lesser commitment in the west wouldn’t have won the war. All we can to is look at the totality of what did happen and guess about things that didn’t happen.
And I stand by half-hearted.
For example, look at what happened when poison gas was first used. It was unexpected and it had a devastating effect. A big section of the German line collapsed and the defenders fled the line. But a major breakthrough? No. Why? Because Haig didn’t have any troops standing in reserve to advance through the open German lines. The Germans eventually recovered and reinforced the line.
Or tanks. In their first battle, they broke through the German lines. But as you point out, they were mechanically unreliable and quickly began breaking down. Within a couple days they were all out of service. So did Haig say, “Okay, we’ve got some teething problems with these new weapons. We need to develop better repair and recovery and make these things more reliable so they can stay in battle. We’ll do better next time.” Again, no. What Haig actually did was decide that this first use proved tanks were unreliable and parked them in the rear.
Or amphibious attacks. It was the British cabinet that insisted on landing troops in Turkey. But Haig refused to assign any troops to that purpose. He thought the whole idea was wrong. The cabinet then went ahead and planned on making it an all-naval operation using marines for the landing. Only at the last minute did Haig agree to send a token army force instead.
In all of these cases, Haig had to be pushed into trying something new. And in every case, he clearly didn’t believe in the idea he was being forced to use. He was essentially saying “Okay, if you insist, we’ll try your silly new-fangled notion. But just you watch. It’s going to fail. And when it does, we’ll put it on the shelf and go back to doing things my way. Cavalry attacks - that’s the thing that wins wars.”
Here in Britain it left a huge gaping wound for decades afterwards; I have the impression that the wound was healed by the Second World War, but there’s still a very faint scar. Back in the 1960s there was a stereotype of the doddery senile Great War veteran with his medals and tales of eating bully beef in Wipers, just as in real life there were lots of people in their 60s who grew up in the midst of total industrial war, economic malaise, and mass unemployment, and were probably not in the best of moods because of it. The Last Fighting Tommy passed away in 2009 and you’d have to be a history buff to know much about the fighting nowadays, but I reckon that most native-born British people over the age of thirty or so could quote a few lines from Blackadder Goes Forth, and could tell you that Haig was a Field Marshal - rather than a type of coffee - and that the war was a grim affair fought in muddy trenches, and that the Germans had spiked helmets.
And that it was fought because some bloke called Archie Duke shot an ostrich because he was hungry. And the ostrich died for nothing. As did thousands upon thousands of people buried under plain white headstones in little cemeteries in villages that are now too expensive to live in. As a living thing the Great War is long-dead, and the fault lines it created were amplified and annihilated by the Greater War that followed. Nonetheless people do still argue about the conduct of the war, viz this very thread. It is my opinion that the optimal military strategy - taking into account the needs of the many, and not the desires of the few - would have been for the upper classes of Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and indeed the entire world to be penned into a field somewhere in Schleswig and then machine-gunned, grenaded, and bayoneted by the common man for as long as the common man had bullets, grenades, and functional bayonets. They were the problem. Everything stemmed from them. They were gangsters. A parasite race.
On a purely cinematic level, the range of treatments you can give the war are very limited. It wasn’t really a war of individual heroes. It was a war of masses that traumatised and disillusioned a generation. There was Paths of Glory, All Quiet on the Western Front, Gallipoli, but there are only so many films you can make about the cold mathematics of attritional warfare. And there was Lawrence of Arabia, which is as much a World War One film as Apocalypse Now is a Vietnam War film, which is to say that it has its mind on other things. The Second World War was fought on more, and more diverse fronts, with technology that people can still relate to, for reasons that people can still understand, by participants a modern audience can cheer and boo. It’s a pop culture cartoon with a happy ending for the good guys, comeuppance for the bad guys - and eventually a happy ending for them, as well - and years of misery and oppression for the people of Poland and Romania and Vietnam and so on and so forth.
I’ll leave this as it is speculation but suffice to say that I believe the bulk of professional historical and military thought is against your view.
Looking at facts:
What battle are you thinking of? The British first used gas at Loos in 1915 and it was not very successful with chlorine being blown back on to the advancing British. Also, it was hardly totally unexpected as the Germans had already used it themselves.
Again I ask which battle are thinking of? Their first use was was on the Somme on 15 September 1916. Due to production difficulties only 49 were available (only 32 actually entered the battle) and they were not all that successful but despite the shaky start it was at this point Haig asked for 1000 tanks. I can’t think of any point at which Haig “parked them at the rear”. His problem was he rarely had many to use.
You can hardly blame Haig for withholding forces for attacks on Gallipoli - the only landing in Turkey. Gallipoli was in the spring/summer of 1915 - Haig was not made C-in-C of the BEF until December. Decisions on the deployment of forces were made well above his level as one of the two Army commanders under French.
Haig never, ever, advocated cavalry attacks on the Western Front. The BEF maintained a small fraction of its force as cavalry, by 1918 this was down to three divisions, 1.3% of the BEF’s fighting strength. These forces were kept to exploit the hoped for breakthrough. If an attack did break the enemy line the cavalry was the only arm in WW1 with the speed and mobility to turn a defeat into a rout. If you read up on the battle of Cambrai you will find Haig is criticised for not having cavalry available to exploit the unexpected success of the tanks!
As horrible as the casualties in the American Civil War, it was a comparable drop in the bucket to the 5 million killed in the Napoleonic Wars just five decades earlier. But as military analyst Ralph Peters notes, the Europeans invented genocide.
Leaving aside the rant about the upper classes of the world being slaughtered in the name of peace, I think **Ashley Pomeroy **makes a fair point about knowledge of WW1 in the UK. It’s not that accurate (to much Blackadder and not enough military history) but it is there. It does feature in school history lessons and the deaths of the last few survivors attracted widespread national news items.
It is of enough interest, and enough is know about it at least at the basic level, for it to feature as a major element in the second series of Downton Abbey.
Nevertheless, it could not have happened, because working people everywhere in Europe still identified more with their own ruling classes than with foreign workers. It’s always that way, most people are patriots/nationalists, “internationalism” is for intellectuals. And often not even for them. One point I recall from the very anti-Communist Communism: A History, by Daniel Pipes, is that, shortly before the war started, socialists in both the German and French parliaments betrayed their principles by voting for war credits.
Another good author who can remind us there was more to the war than just trenches is Robert K. Massie with Dreadnought and Castles of Steel. I’ve only read the latter which was excellent and deals directly with naval action during the war. The former is supposed to be even better but is more about the naval arms race prior to the war.
I would have read them in order, but my library does not have Dreadnought as an e-book while it does have Castles of Steel.
I may be out to lunch despite - or because of - an abiding interest in interwar culture, but my personal conviction is that WW1 and most of the '20s and '30s was obliterated in the American consciousness by WW2. We became a different country in almost every way because of, and after, WW2. In many ways 1945 was a kind of year zero even though our national landscape and infrastructure was still intact. What came before was either irrelevant or something we wanted to forget.
I recently perused a site with lots of WWI-vintage recruiting posters for sale, British and American. The contrast was interesting.
The British posters were all appeals to honor and patriotism. Train station: A handsome, young, bulging-muscular, mustachioed Briton in uniform on a train platform is shaking hands with a bent old man with a medal on his shirt, apparently his father. Captions: “A chip of the old block” and “Britons! Your King and Country need you to defend the Honour and Glory of the BRITISH EMPIRE!” Train-car full of smiling soldier with an officer at the front making a welcoming gesture: “There’s room for YOU!” “Join the brave throng that marches along!” Clearly aimed at a population of men who, even if they rarely did military service in peacetime, at least were presumed to have internalized the whole set of military values and traditions. (One poster, rather sad in hindsight, says “1915” in big numerals at the top and shows a mass of British soldiers marching towards “Victory,” clearly in sight on the horizon, practically guaranteed to happen this year . . .)
The American ones said nothing at all about the conflict but seemed to be pitching the Army as a sort of self-improvement program. (In one, a sergeant says to a couple of loafers, “If you’d been in the Army, you could be holding up your heads instead of a lamppost!” In another, a young man is being interviewed by a prospective employer who says, “I can tell you’ve been a soldier by the way you stand! Report for work tomorrow!”) Even more interesting are the American posters apparently aimed at men who have already joined up. One shows a shlubbish, indifferent guy in uniform sauntering past an officer, apparently without noticing: “Pity this poor soldier! He can’t salute! His hands are in his pockets!” Another: Pic of a man in uniform: “This man is true color! He stays!” Pic of a blank outline of the same, in yellow, labeled AWOL: “This man is yellow! He fades!” Apparently, America had so little of an active military tradition at that time (no draft since the Civil War; the Spanish-American War was over fast) that the officers felt obliged to nag and coax and teach the recruits just to show up for duty and act like soldiers, dammit!
Never seen anything like that in any American recruiting poster from WWII. By that time, apparently, the lessons the doughboys learned had sunk into the younger male population, generally speaking.
The posters are really interesting but I am not sure they show the difference in culture you see. I think the difference is that they are aimed at different audiences. The bulk of the British ones are, as you say, recruiting posters aimed at the public - the aim is to get men to sign up in the first half of the war before conscription was introduced. Most of the American series are aimed at men once they are in the army - the aim being to make men with no experience of army life see it as a positive thing and remind them of their duty. Hence the stuff about saluting and not going AWOL.
I don’t know but I strongly suspect you would find similar internal army posters from the British side. They had the same problem of trying to turn men with no military experience (possibly with no experience in the family) into soldiers and needed to get over the same messages.
I have been looking online but so far not found anything equivalent to the American “Service Series”.
And often not even for them. One point I recall from the very anti-Communist